Tuesday, July 5, 2016

Cornell Ice Cream and Test Stress

Today has probably been the earliest I've woken up for class. I didn't have to do anything in a hurry, which was really nice because I wanted time to study. I was very collected last week, but everyone is starting to stress out over our test. I had a really good breakfast, and then went to the library. No one was there, but I forgot my flash cards in my dorm so I had to use quizlet.

I had lunch, and then I arrived early to class. Even our professor, Sam, was early today, which rarely happens. We had some pre-class interactive discussion. We talked a lot about fallacies today, probably because it's what the last chapter of the book focuses on and most people knew about them. After multiple stories and such, we focused on how to write our first assignment. It's going to the be the first affirmative constructive. Sam handed out an example of a C- paper, so we could see the mistakes that that student had made and learn from them. Then, he outlined the components of the 1ac. I think that's an efficient way to show us, because it allows us to think for ourselves. We're going to have to do a lot of research, because policy debate involves having lots of evidence. That's overall what the class was today.

Right after class, he said that even though he knew most of us would go off to study, he invited us to go to the Cornell Dairy Bar and that he'd buy us ice cream. I believe he did this partially because he wanted to one-up the other professor who took his class out to lunch. Before actually arriving to the Dairy Bar he showed us a few spots on campus, like the brain collection in the psychology department and the new and old plant science buildings. He knows a lot about the school and the history of it.

Milk bottle statue outside of Dairy Bar

My ice cream!!!!!

At the Dairy Bar, I got cookie dough and triple-play chocolate ice cream with marshmallows on top. It was seriously such delicious ice cream. The marshmallows made it even better. Most of the class that went to the trip hung around at the Dairy Bar for a while. We ended up talking a lot about GMOs, especially because my classmate Hans is from a farm in Iowa. The ice cream at the Dairy Bar is made from the milk of the Cornell cows and those cows are injected with hormones to make them produce more milk. It's rather controversial for some people, but it was good either way.

Once we were all done with ice cream, the 5 of us that stayed with Sam took a trip to a spot behind the agricultural building. There's a monument or sort of memorial to a very old hall that was torn down in the 1980s despite being so important and gorgeous. I wish I could see what the building once looked like, since the replacement is so modern and the old one had a Roman statue.

Picture that doesn't do justice to the monument

Our whole trip ended almost at 6 PM, so I wrote flashcards until it was dinner time. After dinner, I went back to writing flash cards outside. It got dark, so I went up to Donlon to study with whoever was available to study. I'm trying to actually memorize really specific definitions because our teacher says the multiple choice for the vocabulary will be K-type questions and those require for you to know every single detail. I just want to take the test and get it over with at this point. Other than that, I love the class and the discussions and getting exposed to debate.